


orangeburst

by delight



Category: SEVENTEEN (Band)
Genre: (which should be soon!), Beaches, Gen, M/M, Pining, will update tags once second chapter is posted
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2017-08-22
Updated: 2017-08-22
Packaged: 2018-12-13 23:52:41
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,794
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11771073
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/delight/pseuds/delight
Summary: We always go back when we need to most.





	orangeburst

**Author's Note:**

  * For [kyeomz](https://archiveofourown.org/users/kyeomz/gifts).



> hello, recipient. i really enjoyed your prompts! i hope you find this satisfactory once it's complete ☆

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> summer one

The summer Jeonghan dyes his hair blond, Seokmin coincidentally buys a crappy polaroid camera to capture the sunset.

He’s got his hands full of trail mix packs and s’more bags, a bottle of milk hanging on each pinky finger, and the basket by his feet has a small mountain of more sensible food that could feed a large family for two months. And he _still_  somehow spots the polaroid camera there, among all the yo-yo’s and perfume bottles mysteriously placed next to each other in that hole-in-the-wall store.

He picks the camera up carefully with his index fingers - the only fingers he has free - like some sort of crab, or one of those crane machines that let you pick a doll except they actually don’t because their real purpose is to just eat your money with no remorse, and deposits it in front of the cashier. Then he dumps the trail mix and s’mores and goes back for the basket.

It’s a sunny day. The sunlight hits the windowpanes of the store and keeps hitting, painting his groceries with a lot of brightness that he feels and confidence that he does not.

 

The summer Jeonghan dyes his hair blond, Seokmin’s still just seventeen, belief unshakeable in white picket fences and in every attempt to capture the sunset no matter how bad the photo actually turns out.

 

“We should take a right here,” Jeonghan says. He’s curled up in shotgun with the back of the seat set _way_ back, long hair covering his eyes and effectively blinding him to the world. He’s just saying something to be relevant.

Seokmin reaches out and pokes his thigh. “There’s no right turn for at least another five miles, fool.”

“Oi.” Jeonghan stretches, taking his time in sitting up. “Who you calling a fool, fool.” Then he grins at Seokmin and pokes his thigh back. “Turn the radio on,” he orders.

“No,” Seokmin says, even as he turns the dial. It takes a while before Jeonghan finds something he likes. Then he curls up again. Seokmin tries to catch what’s wrong, because something’s definitely wrong, he just can’t figure out what.

“Hey,” he tries. “Hyung?”

Jeonghan groans. It’s probably the tone in Seokmin’s voice, the way it’s obviously suppressing something else. “What.”

Well, Seokmin doesn’t know what to say. The road stretches on for a pretty long while up ahead, trees waving past in the wind that whips through Jeonghan’s hair and makes them fly over his forehead. “I dunno,” Seokmin says, switching lanes on the empty highway for the sake of something to do. “Everything okay?”

Jeonghan doesn’t reply. He’s pretending to sleep. It's not an unknown tactic and has been used occasionally over the years.

“Hyung,” Seokmin tries again, before letting him be. “Just a few more hours,” he adds, quietly, trying to be reassuring. The wind’s quick to steal his words.

Jeonghan continues to pretend to be dead to the world.

(Maybe that's the problem. Jeonghan's always been good at pretending that, so good once he starts that he ends up really screwing it up.)

 

“This is what you get me,” Jeonghan says, flatly. “I make the mistake of suggesting we go to the beach and stay over for your break, and instead of a hotel room you get me a whole trailer.”

Seokmin smiles, rubbing the back of his neck. “There’s real big windows. We can... leave those open at night? That's what I was thinking. Looked nice in the photos on the ad.” To exaggerate, but Seokmin probably stayed up seventy two hours, picking apart the classifieds until something useful jumped out at him:  _Trailer with electricity and good location along Busan beach._

“There’s electricity, and a stove and all. It’s just room and no beds, so I got the sleeping bags, but…” It had taken string pulling, favor-owing, numerous group assignments he’d singlehandedly managed to get 100% on for everyone involved and friends-of-friends to get this trailer so cheap. In the end he would only need to work some extra graveyard shifts, at the milkshake bar downtown after they get back, to make the total summer rent for this thing. He did make sure to pay half in advance. He takes a deep breath. “What d’you think?”

Jeonghan sends him a despairing glance. Treehouse Jeonghan, cave explorer Jeonghan, I-want-to-become-a-hermit Jeonghan. “I fucking love it, you fucking fool.”

Seokmin smiles wider. “I thought you would.”

Jeonghan sits down in the sand immediately. “How am I going to want to leave this?”

“Come on,” Seokmin laughs, dragging him to his feet. “I’ll manage to get you out of here eventually.”

 

So the summer Seokmin graduates high school, he and Jeonghan live in a rundown trailer by the beach, catch fish for breakfast every day until Jeonghan gets sick of it. Then they get to buying breakfasts with their dinners so they can have day-old breakfast once the sun rises.

“It actually tastes better,” Jeonghan says, through a mouthful of cold cheese croissant. “Like, maybe the sea air or something. Treats it. Like ham.”

Which doesn’t make all that much sense, because first of all bread is very different from tenderized meat, and second Seokmin makes sure to wrap everything up airtight so no air dries up their food or makes it rot. Seokmin nods anyway, wolfing down his own peanut butter waffle sandwich. Which, by the way, was false advertisement. Not a single waffle in sight.

Lunch had started out consisting of whatever Jeonghan decided to try out day to day, (Seokmin had insisted on baking cookies in the first week and was banned forever after, despite countless pleas and attempts at reasoning. (“Everyone starts _somewhere!_ ”)) but somehow settled down on meat pies.

“I really thought you’d settle for minute ramen,” Seokmin confesses the first day after a week of said meat pies, biting into a surprisingly well-baked crust. “Didn’t think you were big on baking. A lot of effort, especially from scratch.” He says it as if he hadn’t seen the Pillsbury pie package thrown on top of the trash as he’d walked up the steps of the trailer.

Jeonghan just smiles sweetly at him from across the tiny table they’re huddled over, knowing Seokmin knows, before giving him a kick on the shin that makes Seokmin jump and bang his knees against the table top. Lunch is just barely saved from falling splat across the floor.

The first month, dinner tended to be at one of the restaurant higher up and farther away from the beach, the one next to the fishing supplies store. But then Seokmin started actually succeeding at fishing and they began roasting the fish outside.

 

At night, Jeonghan either reads a book or writes a letter, and Seokmin tries and fails to sleep.

“Who’re they for,” Seokmin nudges Jeonghan with his toe once, and Jeonghan just shakes his head.

He should have brought books, too, Seokmin figures. He tries to remember what he’d intended on doing after dinner, and recalls something vague about boating. But between meals, while Jeonghan tends to draw in the sand outside, Seokmin swims ceaselessly when the water’s calm, so he’s usually too tired to even try to ask around for boats. Plus, renting oars would probably tip the budget over.

“I can hear you thinking nonsense,” Jeonghan announces, ditching his pen in the wastebin and rummaging around for a new one. “Did you bring any more pens?”

“Maybe. Who’re you writing letters to?”

Jeonghan looks at him, exasperated. “My ex,” he says, and it sounds half-joking, half-defiant.

“Damn,” Seokmin grins, feeling something strange in his gut, “Hyung gets around.” He dodges the kick and gets Jeonghan another, almost-dried pen from his satchel.

Seokmin crawls back into his sleeping bag, cauldron of snakes in his stomach. It's not that Jeonghan never hides from him, it's that Jeonghan never hides from him this long. (Never pretends to be this fucking dead and happy-perfect to the world for an entire month, dreamy-corrugated-metal trailer by the beach notwithstanding.)

Eight minutes later Jeonghan gives up on the letter - shooting him a glare, as if he could read his thoughts - and stuffs it inside a book and crawls into the sleeping bag, next to Seokmin. They’re both wide awake tonight, and after a beat of uncertainty and something that feels like it’s going to blow bigger until it catches fire, Seokmin drags Jeonghan’s sleeping bag close until they’re bumping shoulders.

“Okay,” Jeonghan accedes aloud, and wriggles closer up to him.

Of its own accord, Seokmin’s hand reaches to stroke Jeonghan’s hair. Eyes closed, Jeonghan smiles, like he knows something. It makes Seokmin’s throat dry. He swallows and fails to pretend he didn’t see.

For a while Seokmin gets selfish, thinks only about Jeonghan and himself. Fails to pretend at some more things: that Jeonghan hasn’t known him for a long, long while – for too long. He’s known Seokmin in fifth grade, gangly and small, in seventh grade, gangly and small and beset with acne. In ninth grade, gangly and shooting up, glasses and his brain itching for the camera on the top shelf in his room whenever he’s lonely - and in ninth grade Seokmin gets lonely a lot.

Jeonghan has known him for almost ten years, now. There’s no way Jeonghan doesn’t _know_.

Then.

Jeonghan says, “Minnie-ah, really.”

Seokmin says, “What would I do without you.” Softly, no question marks, not a question. Jeonghan opens his eyes and stares at the ceiling, bangs getting a bit in the way of his eyelashes, so he’s blinking fast to get them out of the way. Seokmin keeps playing with his hair.

“Buy the smoked ham pie mix,” Jeonghan says, finally, “And don’t forget pie crust. Get the Pillsbury pie crust. It’ll be a bit expensive, but I know you’re good at budgeting.”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” Seokmin murmurs, smiling.

Jeonghan sighs, taking his eyes off the ceiling and turning around slightly to face him properly. “Yeah,” he says, expression unreadable for a second. Then he smiles, comfortable. “Yeah, I don’t know either.”

 

It doesn’t always have to make sense. The trip, or how they spend their day, or the things they talk about. It’s lazy, for one. Just a little bit. But mostly it’s comfortable, and quiet, and in the soft hours before dawn as they lie awake to watch the sun rise or as Seokmin turns on his side to see Jeonghan fast asleep and count his deep, even breaths until he's asleep too, it’s the best thing that’s ever happened to him.

They always keep the windows open. Some nights Seokmin slides out of the bag with difficulty, crosses the room and climbs out the windowsill. Sits with his knees to his chest, gritty sand under his nails, and listens to the sea.

When the colors start streaking through the stars, Jeonghan comes and sits next to him, wrapping them both up in his sheet.

 

"You realize you're probably never gonna be completely happy with a picture you take of the sunset," Jeonghan yells over the waves. Seokmin squints, tries turning to the side a little and slanting the view. Bends his knees to make everything look bigger, closer to the ground. Runs around their little strip of sand. Clicks for the shutter again and again and again.

Jeonghan keeps looking ahead, maybe searching for something on the horizon, an answer, or a question, or thinking of what they need to buy next from the grocery store because Seokmin only thought to bring nuts and marshmallows, or maybe nothing.

"Yeah," Seokmin pants, coming back to him. “Just, part of the human experience, y’know?”

“Don’t know,” Jeonghan mumbles, kicking at the sand. At least, Seokmin thinks that’s what he said – the waves are too loud and he has to lipread.

The water rushes at them, and Seokmin looks at Jeonghan carefully. The straight nose, the high brows, hair with roots starting to show whipping about his face. The loosely flapping shirt and his hands stuffed deep in his pockets.

Something shifts and settles into horrible place just then, and for no reason that Seokmin can pinpoint, he knows what’s off.

Jeonghan, always with a way, a plan, two backups and still something to save himself regardless of what goes wrong, looks - he looks lost.

Seokmin goes up to him, slowly, unsure of himself. He thinks of the way Jeonghan always slings his arm lazily around his shoulders, body a little cold but warming fast once he’s close to Seokmin. Jeonghan, nineteen and unreachable, the-only-one-who-dared-to-take-a-gap-year-once-he’d-graduated Jeonghan, Jeonghan with his back hunched over some book or other that Seokmin couldn’t wrap his head around fully since Seokmin can remember. Jeonghan, who proposed this trip to Seokmin, sounding a little shaky and somehow angry over the phone.

“You’re smart, you know,” Seokmin says to him, next to Jeonghan now, close enough that the sea doesn’t get in the way of their voices. “So why?”

“Why what,” Jeonghan smiles, but Seokmin can see that Jeonghan saw that Seokmin saw. “Don’t know what you’re talking about,” Jeonghan insists, and his face falls, jaw clenching. He kicks the sand again, more vicious this time.

Seokmin looks at him levelly, before sighing and turning to look at the sun again. He raises his camera and clicks for the shutter.

“I just think it’s great,” he confesses. “Like no matter how many sunsets there have been since the beginning of time, and how many cameras, since the beginning of – well, cameras. People just keep trying and trying, to get it. Like, everyone, all the time. Trying to stuff something so huge, and - and _beautiful_. Into something as small as one second.” He lowers his camera. “One picture. Something you can hold in your hands and look back at and remember exactly.” The red sky is setting and touching the water, burning and bleeding onto the green and silver of the sea.

The sun is shining like it’s never going to rise again. They can’t look straight at it.

“We keep trying, to get those streaks of orange and the sun itself. But nobody ever can, and we know it. But we keep trying.”

Jeonghan lets his head fall on Seokmin’s shoulder. “Part of the human experience,” he echoes. Then, “This one’s beautiful.” He’s talking about the sunset.

Seokmin turns his camera to the side, gets a blurry shot of Jeonghan’s shirt and his chin and his mouth. “Yeah,” Seokmin says. He isn’t talking about the sunset.

 

He thinks about Jeonghan saying,  _Minnie-ah, really,_  and the number nineteen, and the number seventeen, and a picket fence somewhere, and a _good_ little house. The kind with a garden, and the garden the kind with mint and parsley that grows by the kitchen window at the side and violets at the gate, and the violets the kind that make you think of home. He tbinks about Jeonghan retreating far, far back from problems and that bewildering, angry shake in his voice when he asked Seokmin if he was up for a trip.

 

Jeonghan’s reading his fifth book of their break. Seokmin doesn’t understand how he managed to pack so much in seemingly no bags at all. Then his eyes fall on the small mountain of bags and boxes by the bed. Huh. He somehow doesn’t remember putting them up in the car.

“You didn’t put them in the car. I did,” Jeonghan drawls, turning the page. He’s got his glasses on, too. Seokmin looks at him very hard, then sighs and turns onto his back.

“You got a lot of bracelets.” Seokmin has been thinking about them for a while.

“You are so transparent.”

Seokmin closes his eyes. “Tell me about the bracelets.” Transparency aside, he does want to know where they come from. When had Jeonghan started collecting them? It had started from just a few around his wrist some years back (maybe around Jeonghan’s sixteenth birthday?) and now almost go up to his elbow. They’re not the emo punk rubber bands either. They’re braided threads, cloth and leather. Some of them even have clasps.

Jeonghan doesn’t say anything for a while.

“Every one’s for something different,” Jeonghan sounds kinder, if hesitant. “Just things I want to remember. A bit like an album, but it’s kinda more cryptic and personalized.”

Seokmin heats up with questions. He rolls over onto his stomach. “What things?”

Jeonghan sends him a smile, the kind that lets Seokmin know he won’t get answers to everything.

Seokmin doesn’t stop heating up. That kind of evasion could mean anything. “Any one you’re wearing ‘cause of me?”

Jeonghan smiles again, more to himself, and turns another page. “Not yet.”

It simmers. Seokmin rests his chin on his hand. “Alright. Your parents?”

Jeonghan doesn’t smile. “Yes.”

“Hyung,” Seokmin says, and maybe it sounds like he’s going to start, really start, so maybe that’s why Jeonghan cuts him off immediately.

“No.”

“Hyung,” Seokmin says again, quieter. “Why’d you – ” _Run away?_

Jeonghan closes his book. “I didn’t finish any of these.” His voice is harsh, hands curled against the floor, knees up tight against his chest. “Barely managed to get halfway through any of these _stupid_  books.”

They don't talk about it. That night, once Jeonghan’s familiar fingers zip up into a stranger's fists, they don't talk at all.

 

“What do you think of abstract concepts,” Jeonghan sits up, annoyed. “Like trust. And friendship.”

Seokmin’s tired. He hasn’t slept well the past two days. “I think they’re more concrete than abstract. They’re okay. They’re pretty good.”

Seokmin’s looking out the window. It’s a gray day, looking like it’ll rain. The waves are more restless than he’s seen in the past few weeks. Maybe it won’t rain. Maybe it’ll storm. Maybe that’s why he’s been having such a bad headache he can’t sleep. The atmospheric pressure or something.

“You been sleeping alright?” Seokmin asks.

“No,” Jeonghan shrugs. “How can they be concrete.”

Seokmin turns from the window, crossing an ankle beneath him and settling with his back against the wall. Jeonghan’s roots are showing more, the blond turning dirty and dark circles getting prominent. He’s hugging his knees to himself, bracelets stark against his legs.

“I trust you with my life. I fall over somewhere and it’s dangerous and you touch me, physically, trying to keep me from falling. That’s concrete. It’s physical. I’m here with you, ‘cause I know you and you know me and we’re friends. That’s concrete.”

Seokmin sees Jeonghan eyes unfocus, settled somewhere above Seokmin’s head – probably on the clouds outside – and mouth the word, _friends_ , sees him nod vacantly.

“Okay,” Jeonghan says, eventually, and smiles at him. “That’s good. I’m glad.”

 

“What the hell are you gonna do, kid,” Jeonghan mumbles, when Seokmin’s trying to sleep.

Seokmin knows what he’s talking about, and doesn’t know what he’s going to do. “What are _you_  gonna do,” he shoots back.

A stilted pause, as if Jeonghan had thought he was already asleep and hadn't expected a reply, before Jeonghan’s finger comes up gentle and soft. It runs through Seokmin’s hair first, then trails down his face.

“Go back,” Jeonghan admits, hushed and almost defeated. “’course. I’m not the dumb one.”

Something lifts in Seokmin. “Yeah,” he agrees, this once, mostly under the influence of relief. “I’m the dumb one.”

“Damn right you are.” Seokmin can hear the grin in Jeonghan’s voice. Hear the trembling just clear, too.

“C’mere,” Seokmin says, turns to him and stretches his arm out. Jeonghan pillows his head on it immediately, doesn’t speak a single word after. They’re both awake the whole night. Seokmin doesn’t try to go out to see the sunrise, arm gone numb, nose cold in the wind. When Jeonghan looks at him, from time to time, Seokmin doesn’t want to take pictures. He just wants, for some reason, to disappear.

 

 _Minnie-ah, really. What are you gonna do._  He’d had the whole summer to do something.

 

“My turn,” Seokmin half-teases. The unread books and half-written letters are all packed back, sleeping bags stuffed under their seats. Jeonghan’s hair, at least three distractingly good looking inches longer now, are tied up in a ponytail, and the windows rolled all the way up. No need for the August humidity.

There is a very specific feeling, Seokmin notes, that comes with a full gas tank and anywhere to go. Seokmin's glad to be in the car again.

“Hmm.”

“You believe in picket fences?”

Jeonghan snorts. “Doesn’t matter what I believe.”

It’s a bit unsettling, throwing Seokmin off. “What’re you talking about? I’m _asking_  you, so yes it does!”

“ _You_  believe in them,” Jeonghan raises his eyebrow. “Obviously. You’re gonna build one even when the apocalypse tries to strike you dead with lightning.”

He isn’t wrong. It digs into his stomach and his spine. Seokmin turns up the radio. He still doesn't know what he's going to do.

“Hey,” Jeonghan says, poking him in the thigh like last time. “Eyes on the road. And chill. Not the end of the world.”

Except if Jeonghan says it isn't, then it is. Just a little. Just Seokmin’s personal world, the one he thinks he can hope for.

 

When Seokmin drops him home, Jeonghan takes his time getting his stuff out. Sluggishly pulls bag after box onto the pavement, not once looking over his shoulder to glance at the house. Seokmin sees Jeonghan's mother, arms crossed expectantly, by the window.

“You still don't know, huh,” Jeonghan grins at his shoes when he’s finally done, and he really does look like he's enjoying this little situation: Seokmin, head down, wide eyed, tiptoeing around him for years, and, juxtaposed, Jeonghan's mother like wrath if he moves six feet behind himself.

 Seokmin figures, maybe it's slightly funny. Doesn't know where his sense of humor always goes when it's Jeonghan near him. Never really understood what about Jeonghan makes Seokmin so goddamn sickeningly _earnest_.

Seokmin only shrugs in embarrassed agreement, hands not knowing what to do with themselves.

“Well,” Jeonghan says, at length. “Alright then.” They both straighten. “Thanks, Minnie.” He steps closer to Seokmin, close until the sea couldn't get in the way of their voices if it were here, close until no wind could steal the sound of him (or the scent). He stays there, almost as if uncertain, as if waiting, before he breaks into a smile. Seokmin swallows, doesn't say anything.

“Oh yeah,” Jeonghan says. “Don't forget about the pies.” He walks away, steps onto the pavement where all his things are. “Pillsbury!” And without waiting for Seokmin to reply, he takes a box and a bag and turns around.

“Okay,” Seokmin calls out, gritting his teeth at himself, and Jeonghan sends another smile over his shoulder.

 

It's the last they see of each other in years.

 

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> unbeta'd, sorry for any mistakes!

**Author's Note:**

> the second chapter will be up soon! sorry about that! like i do with every fest/exchange, i scrapped my plots five times over and this is what happened. thanks to dandy ☆


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